Gadgetory

with the full final release of Android pee just around the corner we're really starting to see the benefits of project treble hello there my name's Gary Sims and this is Android authority now if you would like to understand more about project treble and how it will give us faster Android upgrades in the future please let me explain when I was at Google i/o this summer I was able to catch up with Ely an mal chief who is the leader of project treble over there at Google I don't have spend some time talking about project treble and I was able to capture some of that on camera so as we look now at project treble and what it means for the future of our Android versions I'm going to be also showing you some of the things that iliyan had to say about the subject okay so first of all one of the biggest complaints that there is about Android is this version fragmentation that you kind of get one phone is kind of running one version then another phone is running an older version and the OEMs don't seem to upgrade particularly the major version numbers don't seem to come through and if they do come through it can be very slow it's very trickle-down process sometimes maybe taking a year or even more from when Google release a version of Android until it finally hits a handset now there are several different reasons why that protis can be slow some of it is actually the fault of the carriers however there is also some technical issues that project treble aimed to solve let's listen to what ely an has to say great to see you i tell me a little bit our project rebel yeah project trouble is how we our solving androids biggest problem which is that of version fragmentation which you know I hope everyone watching this video is painfully familiar with the problem at its heart is two parts there's a technical problem and I'm popular the technical problem is really because Android grew far too quickly in its rapid growth we didn't have time to design it so that its top piece is properly abstracted away from its bottom piece with the bottom piece being that which is specific to the hardware that India is running on yeah and this is what we did we introduced upwards of 60 interfaces that we introduced to the other why that's important it's because these interfaces enable us to develop the top piece of it independently from the bottom piece and assign the bottom piece to the companies that properly own it such as Paul Tom companies that make mobile CPUs so as you can see with project treble there's been in now a hard line drawn we separate the parts that Google work on the framework and all that kind of stuff and the parts of the OEMs and the SOC manufacturers work on in fact this hardware abstraction layer has over 60 interfaces defined that allow the OEMs to create drivers and hooks into the hardware that they know will work with what Google is expecting on the up half of the whole Android operating system and this has been no mean feat because before that kind of demarcation line was absolutely all over the place some parts were in the framework some parts were down in the kernel and it was a real mishmash of where the kind of line would be drawn between Google and let's say an OEM like Qualcomm and as well as aligning all those interfaces to be in one place there's also been the issue of speed these interfaces have to be very very fast every time you have an interface it can potentially slow things down because you have to transfer data and it has to take this kind of route through this interface now these interfaces that they've designed are actually very very far so that when you're doing things like multi media and this cameras and video and sound all that kind of stuff can flow through these interfaces with very very little impact on the overall performance Android releases happen in and then a company like a company that makes mobile CPUs like Qualcomm it would take me a few months to do their work and then they already are at the end of year so into a device manufacturer you don't have enough time to do your work and launch a device for the holiday season so what we should've is this year absorb that work by the mobile CPUs so that it happens in parallel events and therefore gaining several months over quarter leave for ODS and three four months is an eternity in our industry and that in turn allows the device makers to do their customizations on top of top of Android with plenty of time to launch and upgrade and as you heard Allianz say that means we've saved three or four months in the overall cycle of the kind of release of Google until it hits the OEMs and hopefully that means for Android P and further on we should see much faster updates now obviously as I said there's still the issue of some of the carrier's who have to go and do all their testing and they add in all their stuff they want to add on top but in terms of the relationship between Google and the SOC makers like call Corp and Google and an actual om like oneplus like Sony then that relationship now is much closer technically we're talking now so that the actual changes in Google can flow through to the end-user much quicker and we really did see the benefit of Android pay when the Android P beta was released because it came out on phones from seven different OEMs at the same time as Google released it and that's partly because now OMS have to be able to run the open-source version of Android on all of their phones it's one of the requirements for getting Android certification and because the open-source version is being updated all the time and the OEMs can stay in sync with how these changes are happening they can always make sure that their phones run the latest version and then when finally Google kind of you know draw a line and said right this is version eight or this is version nine whatever they're gonna do then actually the OEMs are already prepared because they've been keeping up to date with Google's development and their phone already runs Google's latest version and you know evidenced by the fact that we have to pick slaw so that's Android P will be on seven different devices and that's cool basically down to the work of Trevor yes also the OEMs of course but there's a lot of heed of that because he's coming out now on the pixel but also all these other devices at the same time yes I mean the entire Android organization had to do a lot a lot a lot of work to make this happen and I'm happy about finally the results manifesto and today you have it project treble now firstly I'm really looking forward to seeing how this will impact the upgrades to our handsets we should be seeing much more faster upgrades we should see what hands it's released with the latest version of Android on them rather than one from you know kind of a year ago and I think this is a very very positive step for the Android ecosystem thank you very much thank you my name is Gary Sims and this is Andrew authority you know on your ass please subscribe please like and please share this video okay that's it I'll see you in the next one